


Perpendicularity

by doublejoint



Series: peachtober 2020 [5]
Category: Fire Emblem: Kakusei | Fire Emblem: Awakening
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-05
Updated: 2020-10-05
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:22:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26845828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doublejoint/pseuds/doublejoint
Summary: The man who wields the Falchion both is and is not Lucina’s father.
Relationships: Chrom & Lucina (Fire Emblem)
Series: peachtober 2020 [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1953295
Kudos: 5





	Perpendicularity

**Author's Note:**

> #peachtober day 5: Sword
> 
> References to canonical character death (in Lucina's timeline)

The man who wields the Falchion both is and is not Lucina’s father. It’s like seeing him fractured in a paneled mirror, jumbled up and put back together not quite right. He is young and strong and he carries half, a third, a tenth of the weight Lucina is so used to seeing on his shoulders. He is angry, fierce, but not desperate; he looks at her as if she were a stranger and--even if she were to say who she was, she wouldn’t be the daughter he knows. She is a stranger, of false name and no face; she wields a better but more battered version of her father’s sword--she has both the sword in her hand and her father in front of her, a wealth she would never have dreamed of. 

Except, her father still carries the sword. He is not old and happy; he has not passed on his mantle to her. She carries a copy of it, like the copy of her sword, and they move in parallel toward the same goal, still unknown to him. She is the one leading, instead of her father, teaching her to walk, teaching her to read, running over the words on a page with his finger.

Lucina’s father is here in front of her, and she hates herself for not completely loving every minute of it. Even if she fails, isn’t this what she wanted, most of all? Not the world, not the restoration of Ylisse, not to turn back the burning and the ashes and the death and destruction, but a few more minutes, hours, days, with her father? 

She’s the Exalt (well, not here, not exactly). Ylisse comes first. 

(Maybe, she’s thought, several times along the way, it’s supposed to all burn down. It was destined. She’ll lose if she tries or if she stands by and lets it all consume her--but she can’t, even if she’s doing everything wrong; she can’t, if not for her friends or herself but for her family, to rob them of what they never had in her own memory and her own time. But even if she fails spectacularly and makes everything ten thousand times worse by interfering, she’ll be glad she did it, if only for this.)

The man in front of her is not her father, not wielding the sword she remembers and holds, except--memory is a liar; memory fades in the sun like a tea stain. She wakes up and tries to think of her father’s hands on hers, her father’s smile at her mother, calling out his love, and what exactly had that voice sounded like? It is not the same as the voice that commands the Shepherds--or maybe it is. Maybe this is the part of her father that she was never meant to know, that she shouldn’t know. A parent is not a peer, not a colleague, even when they’re fighting the same fight as you are.

Or maybe, due to her arrival, she’s already shifted him too far off course to become anything like the man she remembers (less and less). Maybe memory’s too much of a liar for her to ever really know. Maybe he’s too much inherently himself for her to make a difference if she saves him from a thousand deaths and injuries and betrayals. 

She’d lose the memory anyway, eventually. She’d end up with a memory of a memory of a memory, not so much partitioned by a mirror but disappeared in a recursive reflection on the inside of a mirrored box, too small to see. Or, more likely, she’d fall to a terrible fate. So to sacrifice that more quickly for her father to live two or three times long a life, a life not torn apart by war and loss? For this version of herself to have her parents, for her friends to have theirs? It’s no contest. It’s a choice she’d made with no regrets. Perhaps she’s just greedy enough to want to be this Lucina, the small maskless baby, with a better prospective future than she’s ever remembered happening. Perhaps she’s just got a big enough heart that seeing her own father look at her like this cracks her a little more each time--she remembers him enough for it to hurt. She remembers him enough for the parallel blade in her hand to weigh more than it should, sometimes, for her to want to cling to it.

She could tell him. She should tell him--no, she shouldn’t; it’s dangerous.

If she told him, all of it would hurt more. She would be a stranger to him but they would both know that she really should not be, and her father has--will, will not (if she succeeds), already does--borne so much weight on his shoulders.

She draws her blade, a poor facsimile of all the times she has seen him do it, a way that he doesn’t do the same, young and uninjured. She parries his strike; she dodges his blow; more than any memory of her father holding her, talking with her, teaching her, it is seeing him in that arena that is seared most fully into her brain. It’s like an idealized image, the father who has only existed before in her mind in portraits of his youth, standing fully before her, falchion to falchion, champion to champion. 

The father she knew is long gone, to a road that’s all but disappeared beyond a bend in the diverted path. The man with the other sword is the only father she has, and he is better than she could have hoped or asked for, even if he never knows her as more than Marth, the opponent who won’t explain himself. But it’s up to her to make herself and her actions worthy of his name, of the name she assumes, of the name she shares with a child whose hands should not clutch the hilt of a sword for many years to come, and who should only ever know this father.


End file.
